Arriving at Martin's Cove

   We got to Missionary Village on Ranch 66 on the first of May 2014. We were happy about our home. It is a two bedroom mobile home about the same as number 6 at our place in Terra Bella, Ca.

This is the rickshaw which we took on our first day of training.

   The next day, Friday, May 2, 2014 was a training session for trek leaders coming from their stakes. There were over two hundred youth leaders. That’s a requirement for any stake or ward. Before they can bring their youth on a trek here, they must send some leaders to participate in a training session. All of the newly arrived missionaries went on the trek also.

    I took a rickshaw in case Dorothy wouldn’t be able to walk the whole way. She wasn’t. I started pulling her up the hills. She was out of breath. We are at 6200 feet. Elder Jensen helped me pull her up the hills for the rest of the trek.

Totally, we went about 9 miles that day. Dorothy walked at least five, but we stopped from time to time, and the last year’s missionaries told stories because the stake leaders that were being trained needed to hear the stories. The stake leaders of their own youth are supposed to take charge of the trekkers. Our job is only to be there for assistance and tell stories if asked. Usually one missionary is in the front and one in the rear.

 The next day was also a training session, but we went to 6th Crossing about 60 miles from Martin’s Cove. It is another Handcart Site, further up the trail. It includes Rocky Ridge, the hardest part of the Mormon/Oregon/California/Pony Express trail, not because it is so steep, but because of the large rocks the wagons and handcarts have to be pulled over.

A handcart with Devil's Gate in the background.

 In 1856, the Willie and Martin Handcart companies landed in Boston and New York and took a train to Iowa City, Iowa. From Boston, the Willie Company arrived first in the Thornton, and were loaded into box cars with benches fastened to the floor. They thought that ride was uncomfortable, but the Martin Handcart company were put into cattle cars without any benches at all.. They had to sit on the floor on the ride from New York.

 Here is one of our first letters, written on the day we reported to the Mission Training Center in Provo, Utah, to our family about our mission to Martin’s Cove:

 "April 21, 2014, "Today we start our training at 10 a.m. 

"We have been studying about the hand cart treks. After Joseph Smith and Hyrum were killed in June 1844, the Saints (members of the church) in Nauvoo were getting attacked more and more by mobs. The mobs demanded that the Saints leave, so they did, straggled out over the plains for years. 

"Brigham Young wanted to help the poor Saints, so he developed the Perpetual Emigrating Fund (PEF). More wealthy Saints donated what they could, and it usually was not much because everyone had to leave their homes, businesses, furniture, and just get out, or leave the Church, or deny that Joseph Smith was a prophet. They wouldn't do that, so they just left their property. They donated their pennies to the PEF. 

 "After a while there was enough to make loans to families to buy wagons and food for the 1300 + mile trip to Salt Lake. Usually they donated in kind, grain, wagons, chickens, etc because the monetary system was not developed. 

 "The poor people promised to repay the PEF as soon as they got to the Valley and could do it. "It was dangerous anywhere in the United States to be a Mormon, so those who gained a testimony by praying and asking God if Joseph Smith really did see Him and His Son, Jesus Christ, and received their answer had no choice but to leave and go west or deny that God had spoken to them, too. Many gave up under the persecution, but thousands were faithful to their prayers and just packed up and left. Some packed their stuff in wheelbarrows and walked the 1000 miles. 

William Henry Jackson's painting of handcart pioneers crossing in front of Devil's Gate. Where the visitors' center now is.

 "Missionaries were sent all over the world, and the poor people wanted to "gather to Zion," but they could not because it cost at least the equivalent (2014) of about $12,000 to come to America. 

 "The PEF was extended to the Saints in England. Persecution increased there too. One person would join the Church in a family and the rest of the family would kick them out, but there wasn't, enough money in the PEF to bring everyone, so faithful families waited years or began to send only one child or one parent to Zion. 

"In 1855 there were crop failures in the Salt Lake Valley and people there hardly had enough food for themselves. Earlier, one missionary going east to start his mission met a man walking to the gold fields in California with all of his supplies in a wheelbarrow and wrote to Brigham Young about it. Brother Brigham figured out the hand cart concept. He said something like this:

Dorothy is pointing to the daily ration of food available.

"

'If the Gentiles (non Mormons) can walk across the plains and mountains for their God Gold, think what the Saints can do for the real God of Israel.'

" That's how the handcart system was started. In about 1854 there were 11,000 Saints in Utah, but 30,000 in England. Sometimes they would even get fired from their jobs there because they joined the Church, so they wanted to come, but the PEF was already in debt.

 "I'll tell you more later as I learn it. To write the story helps me remember it so I can tell it at the visitor centers. "Got to get ready to go to a meeting now. 

" Love, Dad, Grampa, Uncle, Stan, Elder Stark

Mission to Martin's Cove: April 17, 2014 to October 10, 2014

We have been gone on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and since we returned we have been repairing, renovating and re-renting some of our income property, so there were no posts on this blog since May of 2014. Actually in that last post we were living in the Missionary Village in Muddy Gap, Wyoming and about a month into the mission.

Senior Missionaries have different rules than young missionaries, so I could have written, but just didn't have time, and I slept good every night. (So I didn't need to do something when I couldn't go back to sleep.)

Martin's Cove is between Casper, Wyoming in the north and Rawlins, Wyoming in the south, about an hour's drive from either. There is nothing in between but sage brush, mountains and wind.

Wind is blowing the flags horizontally, on a warm day

Wind is the one thing you first notice in Martin's Cove. It blows in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, when it's raining, when it's snowing, when it's sunny, when it's hot and when it's cold.

Sometimes it blows hard. Like the time it lifted the tents of a company of youth and carried them fifty yards. The young people were camping at Cherry Creek Campground a few miles from the Martin's Cove Visitors' Center.

Sometimes it blows softly, like on a hot summer day when we were out on the trail with twenty-five or more handcarts and over a hundred youth pulling them, reenacting the 1856 trek of the Mormon Pioneers from England who couldn't afford wagons and oxen.

Then........ 1856,  the wind was a killer.

It and the cold, and exhaustion and starvation were the cause of the deaths of at least 139 members of the Martin Handcart Company, in and around Martin's Cove. That's why there is a visitors' center. That's why we were there on a mission: to tell the story of the Martin Handcart Company.